Smoking tobacco and other smoking matter such as various herbs, spices, and other plant matter has been a tradition for centuries. Many devices have been developed to assist in the smoking of such smoking matter, including various types of pipes and hookahs.
Today hookahs are readily available for sale at smoke shops across the globe, along with a variety of tobacco brands and accessories. In addition to private hookah smoking, hookah lounges and bars have opened and hookahs have been growing in popularity.
A hookah pipe contains a tobacco or smoking matter in a bowl disposed at its top of the portion. Burning charcoal is placed on top of a heating platform covering the bowl, so as to heat the tobacco, thereby causing the tobacco to smoke.
A variety of charcoal fuel articles is available for use with hookah pipes, typically in the form of solid and semi-solid briquettes and tablets. It is known that such conventional design in the prior art of charcoal articles does not provide desired temperature distribution among various parts of the articles so as to cause uniform heating of the smoking matter or tobacco. Furthermore, solid charcoal briquettes and tablets are often disposed in a very close proximity of the tobacco mixture. This causes highly undesirable scorching occurring when the hot charcoals are placed too close to the tobacco mixture.
Thus, it has been a long felt and unsolved need to provide a charcoal article for use with the hookah pipes, which avoids the drawbacks of the prior art in general. More specifically, there is a need for a charcoal article capable of providing uniform temperature distribution throughout its body and having the main active portions spaced from the heating platform, so as to minimize a possibility of the undesirable scorching. Still further, there is a need for a charcoal article design, facilitating heat transfer by means of air stream convection.